Thursday, January 22, 2009

I was playing with Clojure last night, it looks like a pretty interesting platform, since it has tight integration with the JVM, and seems to have solid native collections.

My first negative impression about the whole lisp thing was that it seems that pretty much everyone that does it recommends emacs or vi or an maybe eclipse plugin and that other editors get no love. I installed emacs only to find out that that the shortcut for undo is bizarre (ctrl+x, then u, or alternatively, ctrl+shift+-). I'm not sure how similar vi is to vim, but I find vim hard to use as well. Eclipse was something a friend of mine suggested, but that turned out to be too slow for my taste. So I'm trying it with good ol' notepad++. Is fighting with editor shortcuts and/or indentation supposed to make me more productive? Bla.

My second negative impression was Clojure's documentation. Almost nothing in the docs has usage examples. The stuff that does is not very easy to understand either. What's a #^{}? What's "k v & more"? What's a valid attr-map for defmacro? Double bla.

Friday, January 9, 2009

<rant>What's with everything being a "law" nowadays? In science, "theories" are usually only considered worthy when there's hard data and standard deviations, so "opinion" or "anecdote" sounds like a more proper term when people want to say how they think the world works in a catchy way.</rant>

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Pretty much everyone is talking about the twitter breach that happened this week and how twitter could've prevented it. One thing that I noticed about the whole ordeal was how the username wasn't secret (in fact they can even be farmed with a bot).

It's a well known fact that hackers use dictionary attacks to find passwords, so shouldn't we be making usernames secret too? I mean, a hacker doesn't necessarily care who they hacked, if it was a celebrity, that's just brownie points.

I don't see what's the big deal with having an extra column on the db (one for username and one for display name), since having the two separated also gives us the benefit of being able to use our favorite display name, even if someone we'll never talk to has the same display name.